25 Years ARGO-HYTOS Italy

Mario Meloni, General Manager, ARGO-HYTOS Italy

Marco Bottura leaves ARGO-HYTOS Italy after 25 years as Managing Director. We sincerely thank him for his excellent work and wish him all the very best for his future. Mario Meloni, who joined ARGO-HYTOS in 2014, is now Managing Director of ARGO-HYTOS.

Mr. Meloni, would you please describe your company to us? Where is it located, how many people work there? ARGO-HYTOS Italy is located in Modena, in the middle of the Pianura Padana, in a strategic position to support most of the industrial area of Italy. Today, we are in total 15 staff members.

Do you produce products in Modena or how do you guarantee fast deliveries to customers? Currently, we have an important stock of components and a little workshop to support customers with prototypes and urgencies.

Can you describe us one of your customer success stories? Since 1996 we have been partner of Cesab-Toyota, a worldwide manufacturing leader in forklifts. After many years of cooperation with CESAB, supplying some “standard series” products, and immediately after the merging of CESAB with Toyota, we launched a big project in the “co-design” of a plastic tank to be fitted in the new Toyota forklift, following the internal shape of the machine, supposed to be supplied all over the world. After many design reviews and discussions with Toyota Japanese design engineers, the tank was finally born in 2008: it includes pipes, plastic ports, breather and naturally a very performing new return filter! The start-up was really very difficult due to the strong recession of 2009 (just one year later) but, step by step, we increased the quantities every year and are now part of a series production of about 8000 forklifts per year with our tank. The rest of their production, about 6000 different models, are almost totally equipped with ARGO-HYTOS filters. High-tech, high quality and just-in-time delivery are requested and respected.

Can you describe us your approach to support our distributors in Italy? During 2014 we created a dealer network to support small OEMs, EUs and competitor dealers, to enable us to focus our sales in activities which support big and medium OEMs and important system integrators. Their activities on the market are very important to promote our brand deeper in the market and install our components in systems / power units that we currently do not produce. Moreover, we support them with joint visits where important customers need to understand and be reassured that we support them every day.

What are your specific plans to push and promote ARGO-HYTOS’ position in the Italian market? ARGO-HYTOS Italy would like to increase sales in components and systems with high-tech technologies. We are preparing our company for that.